If you’ve ever been involved in discussions about product success, you’ve probably come across the question: What comes first, the experience or the value delivered? This is a common dilemma among startup co-founders and product leaders. From my experiences at Gympass and other companies, I’ve explored both sides of this issue, and that’s exactly what we will talk about today.

At one of my clients, a pre-revenue startup, the co-founders are debating whether to focus on the value delivered by the product or the experience to ensure success. Both have strong design backgrounds: one co-founded and led agencies for over 20 years, while the other has over ten years of experience in publishing and advertising.

When presented with this choice, it’s common to hear, “Let’s do both!” At this point, I explain the importance of focus. Developing a strategy means choosing what to do and what not to do. Jony Ive, former head of design at Apple, explains this idea brilliantly in a video I often show:

 

Product development is about making choices and focusing on what’s truly important to success. As former Apple design chief Jony Ive brilliantly explains: “Focus is saying no to something that you, with every bone in your body, think is a phenomenal idea, but you say no to because you’re focused on something else.”

The dilemma between experience and value

Should we focus on building a product that delivers a fantastic customer experience or on creating a product that provides value to our customers?

Ideally, we should have both, but since we should focus on one, one should come before the other.

Short answer: deliver value first, then experience.

Why? Because delivering a fantastic experience while delivering little or no value is doomed to failure, while value with a bad experience can be very successful.

How many apps with a great design and a good experience do we download, use once, and discard? On the other hand, our bank’s app, for example, may have a horrible experience, but if it allows its customers to do what needs to be done (deliver value), we will continue to use the app.

Let me share some stories that illustrate this.

Practical examples

When I joined Gympass, the company was growing rapidly, but the digital experience—for users, gyms, and HR departments—was lacking. Even so, the value delivered was so significant that growth accelerated, proving that value trumps experience at the beginning of the journey.

We then began working hard to improve the experience of our products, which became our focus. I want to emphasize that experience is not just about the interface. Our product required a lot of manual work. When HR sent a spreadsheet to their employees, because our system did not integrate with HR systems, it was processed by an operations team that grew at the same speed as our sales—manual processing results in slowness and errors, generating a bad customer experience.

We maintained this focus for over a year despite several other opportunities to explore. Only when we realized that the experience was reasonable, even though there was room for improvement, we started exploring new opportunities.

One of the ideas we decided to explore at the end of 2019 was the idea of ​​an app marketplace, which we called Gympass Wellness at the time. The idea was to offer apps not only for physical activity but also for meditation, nutrition, and mental well-being. Before thinking about the experience, we thought about value:

• What value are we going to deliver to the apps? Access to our customers. How can we test this as cheaply and quickly as possible? Let’s sell this partnership opportunity. We created slides explaining the opportunity and presented it to 8 apps, of which 6 showed interest, and 4 agreed to participate in our pilot. Note that what we sold was value, not experience.
• What value are we going to deliver to our customers? Access to these apps is in the same monthly subscription model that Gympass delivers by giving access to tens of thousands of gyms. How can we test this as cheaply and quickly as possible? Let’s sell the product on a landing page, explain the value delivered, and see if people are interested. We ended up building what you see in the video below. It is clearly an experience well below what we wanted. However, it delivered value.

 

The experience is not the best. There is no logged-in area, and an account activation link provides access to the apps for each app. However, the value delivered was great, especially since it was ready to be launched in February 2020 when the pandemic hit. Gympass customers started calling us saying they wanted to cancel or at least suspend their contracts since their employees were on lockdown and gyms were closed. We used Gympass Wellness as one of our main retention tools. We grew from 4 to 90 apps in 2 months and from 0 to 500,000 users in 5 months. We delivered value and started focusing on improving the user experience with better integrations with the apps and access to the apps made simple through the main Gympass app. This value delivered was so great that it promoted the evolution of the company’s purpose from “fighting sedentary lifestyles” to “creating universal well-being” and, more recently, changing the brand from Gympass to Wellhub.

A third example is from a client of mine who works with one of the essential services (water, electricity, telephone) and whose main value offer to their customers is a reduction in their monthly bill. The experience is still far from being the best; they have many manual processes to grant this reduction, and the customer journey from signing up to being able to use the service is far from ideal. They are growing a lot because the value delivered is very high. Having clarity on the value delivered, they are now focused on improving the experience.

Based on these three examples – Gympass, Gympass Wellness, and my client from the essential services sector – we can see that the value delivered was the real deciding factor for growth. Even with a poor initial experience, the value perceived by users was so great that it allowed these companies to grow exponentially. Once the value was well defined, the focus shifted to improving the experience.

Apple’s focus: experience or value?

Those who argue that experience is the most important factor often cite Apple as an example. However, even Apple’s most successful products only triumphed when the value delivered was clear.

Some examples where experience came after value:

• iPod: there were already several MP3 players on the market with relative success, so the value of an MP3 player was proven. Even before the value delivered by MP3 players, Walkman already delivered this value of listening to music anywhere in an individual way. With clearly proven value delivery, the focus on experience paid off.
• iPhone: a mobile phone that connected to the internet like many other smartphones of the time, such as Nokia and Blackberry, which had already proven the value of a mobile phone connected to the internet, and also an MP3 player, whose value was also demonstrated with the success of the iPods. Then Apple focused on delivering an incredible experience and launched the iPhone in 2007, but the value delivered had already been proven.

Some examples where delivering an experience without delivering value ended up generating some of Apple’s failures:

• Apple Newton, launched in 1993, had an okay experience, similar to other PDAs. Still, it was more expensive and delivered little value because some features simply did not work correctly. So much so that in 1996, Palm, which focused first on delivering value (small, affordable equipment, with calendar, contact, and note-taking functionality that actually worked), ended up leading the PDA market.
• Apple Maps, launched in 2012, had a very cool user experience and was praised for its visually appealing design. However, because the maps were incomplete, the value delivery fell short of expectations, generating a lot of dissatisfaction to the point that Apple apologized.
• Apple Vision Pro was praised for its integration with the Apple ecosystem and the quality of its mixed reality experience. However, criticisms about comfort, social interaction, content limitations, and technical aspects show that simply delivering a good experience is not enough. If there is no precise delivery of value, customers will not buy.

When we evaluate Apple, we realize that its most successful products, such as the iPod and iPhone, had proven their value before the experience was improved. In contrast, products like the Apple Newton and Apple Maps, which focused too much on experience without delivering enough value, failed. This teaches us an important lesson: value must come before experience

Summary

• If we have to choose where to focus, value must come first.
• Products that deliver value have a much better chance of thriving, even with a less-than-ideal initial experience.
• We can test and validate value delivery simply, quickly, and inexpensively. To test Gympass Wellness’s value delivery, we used a few slides and a landing page.
• Once the value is well defined, the experience can be improved to ensure customer retention and loyalty. This is the path to lasting success.

If you are facing this dilemma in your company, contact me by email or WhatsApp to discuss how we can collaborate to build a strategy focused on delivering value from the beginning with the ideal experience to ensure long-term success.

Workshops, coaching, and advisory services

I’ve been helping companies and their leaders (CPOs, heads of product, CTOs, CEOs, tech founders, and heads of digital transformation) bridge the gap between business and technology through workshops, coaching, and advisory services on product management and digital transformation.

Digital Product Management Books

Do you work with digital products? Do you want to know more about managing a digital product to increase its chances of success, solve its user’s problems, and achieve the company objectives? Check out my Digital Product Management books, where I share what I learned during my 30+ years of experience in creating and managing digital products:

• Digital transformation and product culture: How to put technology at the center of your company’s strategy
• Leading Product Development: The art and science of managing product teams
• Product Management: How to increase the chances of success of your digital product
• Startup Guide: How startups and established companies can create profitable digital products